“I’d Have Divorced My Husband If Not for Korean Dramas” – Vietnamese Women’s Consumption of Television Romance and Melancholia

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the Freudian concept of melancholia and David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s contemporary approach to the concept, this article discusses how Vietnamese married women consume romantic South Korean television dramas as a means to deal with unacknowledged and unresolved loss, or the psychic condition of melancholia. Through a case study of melancholia in a female research participant and a discussion of Vietnamese women’s marital lives, the article proposes two arguments. First, romantic consumption can be a private way for Vietnamese married women suffering from restricted freedom due to societal overemphasis on their familial duties to cope with melancholia. Second, the mass romantic culture, as a melancholic genre, allows married women to collectively mourn lost emotions such as the feeling of being young and being in love. The article makes a theoretical contribution by utilising Freud’s melancholia and Eng and Han’s contemporary approach to the concept for its empirical research. It also enriches an academic understanding of melancholia through its application of the concept to married women’s psychic lives within a contemporary Vietnamese context.

Acknowledgments

This article draws on interview data from my doctoral project, which was made possible thanks to funding from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. I express my sincere gratitude to the research participants whose narratives are featured in this article. I thank Stephen Epstein, Khanh Nguyen, Jack Gammon, Katie Gentile, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on different versions of this article.

Declaration of interest statement

I declare that there are no commercial or financial relationships that could be constructed as a potential conflict of interest.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ While nonheterosexual characters and queer desires have started to feature in some recent popular K-dramas such as Reply 1997 (2012), Reply 1994 (2013), and Prison Playbook (2017), these characters tend to serve a side story to the main heterosexual romance.

² Song Hye Kyo and Song Joong Ki got married in a high-profile wedding in 2017, one and a half years after the broadcast of their hit drama Descendants of the Sun. Their divorce in mid 2019 led to a period of collective mourning online among Vietnamese viewers. Some female fans said over social media that they “lost faith in love” because of the demise of the actors’ romance. Several local news websites published commentaries on their divorce, questioning the “eternity” of love. This interview took place a few months before the announcement of the divorce.

³ Vietnamese in origin: các chị (older sisters). Vietnamese people tend to address one another by kin terms (Szymańska-Matusiewicz, 2014; Sidnell and Shohet, 2013).

⁴ Mari Ruti (2018) offers a fantastic discussion of how human beings cling to an idealized loved object due to their illusory hope for plenitude. This desire for becoming whole through union with the loved object arises from the “lack-in-being” that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan sees as conditioning every human life. I have no space to further discuss this exciting perspective here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thi Gammon

Thi Gammon, Ph.D. obtained her Ph.D. degree in media studies from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She holds an M.A. in global media from the University of Westminster, England. Her research interests include psychosocial studies, psychoanalysis, gender studies, Vietnamese studies, media audience, and the Korean Wave.